Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

Already Writing for Free

I still rely on reading the PI to get information about what will soon to happen with the PI.

I just found this article in the business section. When I worked in environmental consulting years ago, as a sick joke, we would place an empty banker’s box on the desk of someone called into a meeting with the president. For the PI staffers this is no joke right now. In lieu of official notice from Hearst about the future – they have learned packing boxes will be delivered.

People ask me as a reader blogger if I have any idea “what’s going to happen with the PI?” Let’s just say that if there has been an email, I didn’t receive it. Since I moved in December most of my emails have gone into space. But it is more likely the case that there has been no word to reader bloggers either (anybody else get a memo?).

We don’t need boxes to pack our things. We don’t need to be given 60 day notice of termination. We don’t have a union. We have always been writing for free. Did we help bring about the demise of the print edition by writing for free? Or did we help keep the page views high enough that perhaps 20 PI employees will continue to have a pay check after March 18th? Everyone will be “at large” with me now.

Will the archives be intact? Will familiar names and voices vanish?

No use pretending anymore. I wanted to be a reader blogger because I hoped that it would lead to my words in print, not on a screen. Thank heavens for the local weeklies like the Ballard News-Tribune that still get dropped off in weekly bundles and snatched up at the Norse Home. But how long will that demographic appeal? The Ballard News-Tribune has just launched a gorgeous overhaul of their on-line site. A hint – if you want the moving parts to stop moving you’re supposed to buy the ad to fill that spot. Somebody please, make the movement stop.

I don’t know what I am going to do with myself when home delivery stops. When I was only four years old it was my job in the apartment building in Flushing to take the elevator to the lobby to get my dad the paper. Summers on Martha’s Vineyard I would be the one to ride my bicycle to the paper store on Sunday morning where a paper waited with our name on it, brought over on the first ferry. Even now in the summers I often travel on a small boat from the mainland known as the “paper boat.” In college the newspaper was delivered to our dormitory door.

I remember barely sleeping one November and listening for the thud around 5 a.m. in hopes that I would learn who had been elected president. There were so many times that I seemed to listen rather than sleep, waiting because the newspaper would soon arrive. The Boston Globe, Le Monde, The Hartford Courant, The San Diego Union, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

I want to reach for the paper in the morning. I want my news delivered. I don’t want to turn on my computer any sooner than I do already.

I’ve been to the panels. I’ve followed the discussions – it was Craig’s List; it was the print media’s reliance on classifieds, it was this or that, a new model will emerge. But can you imagine if every library suddenly closed? Can you picture an older person who has been reading the paper since they did it upside across from their mother back in 1925? We cannot know what is being lost by going on-line. We don’t know yet who and how it will affect people. Why bother to learn to read at this point?

So like everyone else I wonder what will happen, still trying to substitute rumors with fact by looking in the newspaper. Every newspaper I’ve ever subscribed to has had its flaws, even its scandals, but all the more like family.

Yet another industry rocked by layoffs, but this one has an extra irony…the reporters who try to illuminate the news for us are being kept in the dark. Give or take a banker’s box.

When it happens there will just be silence rather than a thud. We should all open our doors at the same time on the day that the presses really stop rolling and step out on the doorstep, or pause by the empty distribution box or empty rack at the 7-11 to let out a mighty wail. Because it will be a long time before we really know what is being lost, week by week, city by city, word by word and by then no one will listen to our lament.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.